Philosophers austere and lovers wild
Have the same love of cats in their late days:
Pride of the household, powerful and mild,
Thin-skinned like them; like them, set in their ways.

These friends of pleasure and of scholarship
Seek silence and the horror darkness breeds.
If they could bend their pride to rein or whip
Erebus would have them for gloomy steeds.

Dreaming, they have the stately countenance
Of sphinxes sprawled out in some lonely land,
Seeming to swoon into an endless trance.

Their fertile flanks hold many a magic spark,
And specks of gold like finely sifted sand
Bestar their mystic pupils in the dark.